It's Johnny's second birthday, and it seems for all the world as if a strange switch has been suddenly flipped, and my pleasingly fat, persistently happy, enthusiastic snuggler is... different. All is not right in his world, and it shows. He has become more volatile and aggressive. Already he was what some people would call "a handful” (and they're not wrong.): adventurous and risk-taking and EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME… but that’s completely normal and to be expected for many toddlers. Where did this different Johnny come from? Is it a third child thing? Is it that our family moved towns and added a baby within the same year? All we have are questions.
Now Johnny is four, and the discomfort he feels in his own skin is apparent. He’s purposely irritating to his siblings, taunting and needling them until they react in anger, at which moment he flies off the handle as if that’s what he’s been waiting to do the whole time. It's tough to deter him from this goal, and once we’ve reached the point of no return it’s grueling work to restrain him or help him calm down. In addition to this he will nance around the house on tip-toe instead of walking, arms bent and hands flopping around, with a strange look on his face – eyelids mostly closed, corners of the mouth pulled down.
Nance, nance, nance. Throughout the day he acts disgruntled or offended if anyone tries to have a conversation with him, and likely his only response will be “I don’t like you!” Formal gatherings and crowds are right out.
It's during this time, though, that I discover the power of special one-on-one time, when Johnny asks if I will come be with him for a while before bed. Wow, what a “duh” moment, and what a balm to our souls. While spending one-on-one time with J didn’t fix our problem, it did allow me to see the wonderful, peaceful, curious, happy side of him that I adore.
This intentional connection is something all kids crave. Why can it be so hard to meet this need? One reason for me is that I'm so overwhelmed by proximity that I'm left without much energy for actual connection. Apparently the two are not the same, who knew?
At four years old, Johnny also began attending his first class in our homeschool group, which met one day a week. I was aware things could be hairy, but I wasn’t aware enough to think about what all our options might be ahead of time. Actually, I mostly felt like there were no options, and that Johnny – and the rest of us – would just have to make it work. My friend taught Johnny’s class, and I knew that he liked her and, from what I heard, was fairly quiet and decently behaved in class. It was a completely different story when it came to lunch time and he was with me again, though. He seemed very uncomfortable, and struggled to sit and eat his lunch. Ha! You know what, scratch that entirely – he'd actually ignore his lunch completely and instead lie on his back on the floor and push himself all the way around the room with his feet. Sigh. The general situation did not get better as the year wore on.
It’s the following school year, Johnny us in the class I’m teaching… and it has become unbearable.
I remember telling Ben that there was NO reason for us to continue torturing ourselves this way – wasn’t our priority to be observant of our children and give them what they need to thrive, instead of continually trying to pound a square peg into a round hole? Weren't we homeschooling because we thought it would give us a better chance of doing just that? This situation wasn’t good for Johnny or for me, so we asked for help, and J got to spend homeschool community days on the farm with some of his favorite people. We all heaved a sigh of relief, and he had a wonderful year.
Every new first day of school after that was an experiment… what would Johnny do? And every year, it was clear immediately. Johnny would freak out, and then so would his mother.
It was after a brutal first day of school when he was 6 that I told some friends everything that has transpired that day, and one recognized possible signs of Sensory Processing Disorder. I thought that made sense too, and we decided to give Occupational Therapy a try, using techniques we found in YouTube videos. J was most decidedly not a fan, so we let that go.
A few months later he told me his legs felt wiggly at night, and kept him from being able to sleep. We tried some things to help that– yoga, magnesium, iron supplements, a weighted blanket, and shortly after employing these things he stopped mentioning the wiggliness, and thankfully the night terrors which had plagued him almost nightly for years seemed to lessen... but his behavior had not changed.
Would we ever figure this out?
Now we've made it to last summer, to 2021, and we have some friends staying with us for a weekend – a mom and her son. As you can well imagine, they got to be up close and personal with the crazy when it hit, which sounds awful, and was, but was also so beneficial. My friend has a solid grasp of relational health, child development, and family systems, and asked if she could tell me what she noticed. Absolutely, yes, please, help me!
“You are being a shock-absorber for Johnny.”
Ope.
This made allllllll kinds of sense.
I was expending more of my energy in the role of damage control and making myself the container and restrainer of all his frustrations, and less on outlining healthy boundaries: acknowledging his struggle while giving him appropriate ways to release his feeling energy, and giving a firm no to the harmful ways. I suddenly felt empowered to get into the driver's seat in our relationship, and stop allowing myself to be dragged along behind it. This had such a positive impact in our lives... but it still didn't fix his problem.
Last fall Johnny was 7, and once more we did the first day of school experiment (see picture). It was hellish, and resulted in Ben saying that he would stay home with John on school community day (Thursdays), and I replied with "Good!" and we proceeded.
Our Thursdays began to be great for everyone. Johnny and Ben were really enjoying their time together every week, and the other kids and I were enjoying our Scholé group... but Ben and I had another problem.
Ben’s normal day off is Friday, and he’d use that day to be with the kids while I went somewhere to have time to myself, an arrangement which is necessary for the health and happiness of everyone. But now there’s another day of the week requiring his presence away from work that he needed to make up somehow, but he didn’t have another day to give… and neither did I. Meanwhile, Johnny’s struggle was amping up again.
The pressure was high, and we were stretched to the breaking point. No relief, no relief. I wanted to die. This was not sustainable, but I couldn't see any solution.
Then, God gave us two.
Previous steps in the journey:
Diddle Diddle Dumpling, My Son John: The Birth Story (so TMI and stuff)
Diddle Diddle Dumpling, My Son John: Developing
Steps that followed:
Diddle Diddle Dumpling, My Son John: The Dream
Diddle Diddle Dumpling, My Son John: Light at the End of the Tunnel